http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/BoWMyris/11 ... ga-Preview
I've been reluctant to start reccommending vanguard to the masses just because of what a horrid start it got off to. I've been playing since launch and i have seen the game steadily improve, i feel like the game has gotten to the point, that it is finally ready to start being what it promised to be. Vanguard SOH offers alot to all streams of players, but it never really was as hardcore as it was promoted as being. This all changes with the introduction of Raiding in the next few weeks.
I chose to write this now to give folks a time to get back and geared/leveled up in time for Ancient Port Warehouse (the first raid dungeun) to hit the live servers.
Ancient Port Warehouse
This zone will be the first raid zone vanguard will recieve, the upcoming patch also includes two raid targets outside of APW, one of Qalia and one on Thestra. Ancient Port Warehouse is going to be 18 man content. And with piles of wings, 21 bosses one of which a dragon, and countless subbosses it is a rather epic dungeun crawl.
Vanguard does not have instances so the competition will be fierce, but by implementing lock-out timers on entry wing mobs and a riftsystem for guild to skip content they have already beat, it should cut down on the chaos.
That being said, expect Ancient Port Warehouse to offer a difficulty never seen before in mmos, The rest of this article will focus on my experiences as a raid tester.
The entrance wings into ancient port warehouse should be relatively easy for organized guilds to clear through the trash mobs, but the difficulty scales up very quickly, the first named in the dungeun should seperate the pretenders from the actual raiding guilds, the bosses in Ancient Port Warehouse are VERY HARD, they imploy a unique UI, that enables them to react to raiders strategies. While they have weaknesses, just knowing the strategy by no means guarentees victory, limiting the raid force to 18, means that every single person in the raid will have to work as a unit, be able to make split second decisions, and have a near flawless understanding of their respective class. Simple zerging will not work, once you have engaged the mob only the 18 in the raid party can interact with the monster and the raid group itself. "Tank and Spank" is a thing of the past, and with 10 minute refreshes on each healer's combat rez, limiting deaths is essential.
Once you progress past the entrance wing, you will find a very difficult experience waiting you, trash mobs will whipe the ill-prepared raids. The bosses all have unique abilities and secrets that make each fight very challenging and unique.
The being said one of the biggest problems facing Vanguard at launch was performance. SoE along with the test raid guilds have worked very hard to optimize the raiding process, this work has paid off not only for raiding but for general vanguard performance as well. I was able to raid Ancient Port Warehouse on my laptop that barely got 10 fps on maximum performance on live before Game Update 3 (its an old shitty laptop); Fighting a boss with 18 people on my screen, particle effects TURNED ON, i was able to get around 25 fps, not only that but most of the significant memory leaks have been found reducing Crashes to Desktop to almost zero.
So if your tired of the same ole shit in WoW and your looking for a new challenge, i reccommend Vanguard Saga of Heroes. For those that have quit Vanguard and were lurking waiting for a good time to come back, the time is now, so you can get geared up and in a raiding guild to experience Ancient Port Warehouse.
Myris,
50 Dreadknight
Raid Officer for Blades of Wrath